Kevin, man, take a break. Maybe pull a tag off a mattress or take your trash can out a day early. You're going to suffocate beneath all these rules. If Louise Gluck sues us for posting her poems I'll take a part-time job and pay the fines. Breathe, dude, breathe.

As I think I did when we were talking about Dylan, I want to drop in here a quote from what the prize is actually for: "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction".

I find those last 4 words ambiguous and interesting. Anybody want to talk about how they might or might not apply to Gluck? Anyway, it's not just a prize for "outstandingness." FWIW, I don't have much of a take on Gluck. I admire her poems often when I see them, but she is not among the poets who really, really stick with me or blow me away.

I posted this article last time around (where the choice of Handke really vindicated the article's thesis); we don't need to discuss whether dril should win it again, but I do think it has a nice discussion of what "in an ideal direction" means.

I'll shoulder part of that burden, John. How cool would it be to be sued by a Nobel laureate? I'll add her to Notable Lawsuits on my resume. Some universities might dig that.

Could be a worse choice. In the past 24 hours I’ve tried to like her stuff. Not seen everything. Untranslated. In English, American English! Managed to sort of weakly like parts of some. We are ninety degrees apart in lots of dimensions. It isn’t just that I’m male. There are different facets to poetry: imagery, music, humor, story, something that is simply charm, ideas, depth, zest, snark, the flash of opposites. Her content either doesn’t have much of these for me or we are very much out of resonance. She has a low level of most of them, but her music is dilute and what she substitutes for that mysterious thing called “sell” hardly moves the needle for me. Maybe it is because I’m male, since I spent a lot of time with a really good woman who wrote like her. I do respect that sparky umlaut. She’s okay; there have been better. I want fireworks or subsonics now and then. Scope. Not present. Or scope I can’t trust.

What a surprising pick. Still hoping for Anne Carson or Adonis.

As Tim Parks wrote in 2011, the year Transtromer won it, the international pretension of the Nobel Prize is ridiculous. How well can the jurors know the work of the best poets in Yemen or Somalia or Uzbekistan? Is it reasonable to think that a Swedish panel of judges could be so well informed about world literature that their pick reflects the stated objective?

The choice of Gluck is a surprise, pleasing to some, but the concept of the Prize itself needs revamping. Maybe the jury should switch countries every year. That would be interesting.

I find the descriptions of Glück's poetry after Noble prize surprising. Annders of the Nobel Committee spoke of her "biting wit and humor," which made me say, "Humor?" Don't get me wrong I admire her work very much, but the poems I've most familiar with and admire: "The Drowned Children," "The Garden" "Horse" and "Eros" are… well not exactly thigh-slapping. Neither do they strike me as "elevator music" or whatever it is Sam claims they are. And if she has wide appeal I believe it's because one of her themes is the absent person who haunts the narrator – the ghost in the walls, as a friend of mine wonderfully describes this particular form of haunting. And who does not have one of those?

Not bad suggestions, Andrew. One thing that obviously contributed to Glück‘s being chosen is that what poems I’ve seen of hers are staggeringly easy to translate. No toughies there. Why? Because she doesn’t really exploit her own American English. Scant music, little feel for exactitude in sonics (though some); it’s almost all in “imagery” and message without massage; imagery alone, ideas alone, can only get one so far. Suppose one doesn’t ride with the image or the message, what’s left? There are European poets whose message I don’t care for, but whose technique I can learn from. Too many first person pronouns in this post—I expect a typhoon of disagreements, but there it is. She brings me no joy, or not enough to get me onto the bus.

Rob, humor is a notoriously variable quality. I see Gluck's humor as being in the same range as Dickinson's: wry, ironic, understated. When I organized a reading of her work at my university many years ago, it was the double-voiced poems (wife and husband, with one italicized and the other not) from Meadowlands that got the most laughs. But they did get laughs.

Susan